The first GPU went on sale decades before 1999: all personal computers used dedicated hardware to accelerate text mode - none of them could early on draw pixels fast enough to draw a screen of text at anything usable for text editing.
All laptops use a GPU since the very first PCs used BIOS routines to access the graphics card, which, surprise surprise, accelerate textmode to make it usable. You're proving my point.
Same goes for pretty much any MIPS router that connects to a screen. List your make and model, and I'll find the docs showing you how the GPU in it is used to draw characters in text mode.
Even the term "text mode" is a holdover from those 1970s era cards: they had dedicated graphics modes where you draw pixels, and hardware accelerated modes called textmode where ASCII bytes get drawn, by hardware acceleration, as characters.
All laptops use a GPU since the very first PCs used BIOS routines to access the graphics card, which, surprise surprise, accelerate textmode to make it usable. You're proving my point.
Same goes for pretty much any MIPS router that connects to a screen. List your make and model, and I'll find the docs showing you how the GPU in it is used to draw characters in text mode.
Even the term "text mode" is a holdover from those 1970s era cards: they had dedicated graphics modes where you draw pixels, and hardware accelerated modes called textmode where ASCII bytes get drawn, by hardware acceleration, as characters.